F# – Converting your C# brain to the F# way
- by MarkPearl
My brain still thinks in C#!!! I have been looking at F# and trying to figure out the basics of it, but all the time in the back of my mind I am going – what is the C# equivalent to this or that… It’s frustrating because I almost want a F# to C# dictionary the whole time – and simply translate my C# code to F# – which would negate the main motivation for learning F# – as I want learn functional programming - if I was simply doing C# code in a F# syntax I would be gaining nothing! So I am experiencing pain while my brain forms some new neural networks… but luckily I live in a country where we have 11 official spoken languages, and plenty more unofficial languages so I have gone through the pain of learning how to speak a new language before – and I am finding the process is almost identical in learning a programming language that promotes a different way of looking at problems (from Object Orientated to Functional). That beings said… the first thing to learn is the basic syntax… I have searched the web for appropriate places to get a translation – and have been quite disappointed with what is out there for F#. Luckily, OCaml came to the rescue. There are some really good tutorials on getting started with OCaml syntax, one in particular that stood out was the OCamal-Tutorial. What I particularly like about it is that it is doing comparisons between C based languages and OCaml. Give it a read sometime – it’s well worth it and has definitely helped me understand F# a little better.
